Follow the rise of GitHub and you have to also look at Atlassian and its powerful combination of tools for developers, particularly in the enterprise market. Today Atlassian announced a set of upgrades to fuel its continued growth and to prepare for the upcoming competition as application development goes through extensive changes across the enterprise. The distributed nature of Git is making it the choice for developers. Git is widely viewed as the future of development environments for collaborating on code — especially with the popularity of GitHub.
Atlassian has updated Bitbucket, which it acquired two years ago and is a competitor to the recently launched GitHub for Enterprise. The new Bitucket features an update to the user experience in order to make it easier to share code and track projects online. The service now also includes in-line commenting and integration with JIRA, the company’s project tracking software.
It has also updated Stash, a behind-the-firewall code management system. Stash’s new release introduces two improvements: pull requests and in-line commenting. “Pull Requests” are the modern way for developers working with distributed source to collaborate on code changes as a team, reviewing changes before those changes are “pulled” into the main codebase. Stash also added in-line commenting support for pull requests so developers can quickly discuss code changes before and after they are committed. This improves the accuracy and auditability of the codebase, which has to be tracked due to the constant update that happens during development.
The company says the new Atlassian offerings allow users to migrate their code development efforts to Git. So clearly Git is the center of the debate here, and GitHub has risen with the rise in Git’s popularity. This news today marks Atlassian’s next stage: bring a better experience and collaboration to the developer experience.
Atlassian President Jay Simons said in an interview last week that Atlassian has put a big emphasis on simplicity. They see it as an opportunity to onboard developers to a new community and build its capability with Git.
I think that gets to the heart of what we see in the enterprise developer market. More people are becoming developers. Atlassian has been at the heart of this shift. The company makes collaboration software for teams. Simons says the exploding “digital economy” is driven by software, and nearly every company on the planet is becoming, in essence, a software company. In that respect, all team-building software needs to share and track three things: content and ideas; activity and projects; and code. It is this three-legged stool that Atlassian is focusing on with, respectively, Confluence, JIRA, and its developer tools Bitbucket and Stash.
But the competition is getting more intense as more companies like GitHub enter the race. It’s an explosive time in the digital economy – tools like those from Atlassian will become increasingly valuable. The trick is finding the right fit within the enterprise and the external world of the cloud.
GitHub offers a virtual machine integration while Atlassian takes a different approach. Simons said Github customers wnat to choose their own database. He said people can’t control a change to the database with virtual machines. Of course there are advantages and disadvantages of virtual machines. It’s one file you run in one way.
Atlassian expects to see continued explosive growth in the enterprise developer market. He said the company has for the past five years seen compound annual growth that is “north of 40 percent.”
Atlassian is yet another enterprise company that shows it has the strength to pursue an IPO. It has not made any formal announcement but with $100 million in bookings it would seem a likely option.
Now it just needs to be a Git leader.